Ranting is not my favorite way to express, I’m more like a constructive guy. But also, the blog is a reflection of what I’m doing right now. And for the title of the post you can guess I’m not doing a lot of GIS.

Lately I’ve been spending my time reading some questionable code, which made me think about the habits of programming. There’s no exact science here, but it is true that bad handled code can explode really fast creating a series of problems.

Maintenance hells.

A bug fixed, uncovers another bug.

Hard to get somebody up to speed.

Lots of snorting (iup that’s me).

Clear increase of gray hair (iup, that’s me).

I started drafting a post about this topic. Then, it exploded in size. So I decided to split it in digestible bits of enjoyment.

The original title was: The Code Apocalypse but I settled for something milder because… that’s my style :-D.

When I think about sprites, my mind goes directly to the NES, and SNES era.

The graphics were meshed together in a way that was easier to handle than multiple images. And well, now they have this nostalgic appeal. I can’t watch this without a smile.

Luigi Sprite from Super Mario Bros.

As old as 10 years ago (already? :-O) A list apart published an amazing article on how to use this same idea to reduce the amount of browser petitions for images. That article is wonderful, but apart (hehe) from that, it urges people to think creatively!

Long story short, this is going to be a post on how to create a CSS sprite image and stylesheet with 100 lines of python.

Jenkins is usually the frontend for projects to check their build status, but for some, Jenkins is the product that we develop, or where we drop plugins etc. In that case, we don’t want to do this into production.

In our case we work with Open Nebula as a VM provider, so it is fairly easy to create a quick VM to test something and then just remove it. It is not as common as having your own Jenkins instance, but since I found that I was doing this quite commonly, it was time to automate.

In this post I present an automatic way to set up a quick Jenkins host. So I just have to type a command and come back later.